Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Tharman's good employment numbers

Tharman paint rosy picture about our employment statusFrom 2001 to 2010, the median monthly income grew 11 per cent in real terms, or 29 per cent in nominal terms.......There were 1,712,600 Singapore citizens in the labour force in June 2010, making up the majority or 58.3 per cent of the labour force.......In addition, Singapore has one of the highest employment rates internationally - with nearly eight in ten Singaporeans (aged 25 to 64) employed in 2010.

After looking at the numbers in MOM website, I conclude that Tharman did a good job in painting these numbers. It is quite difficult to critic without raw data although I am quite suspicious about many of the details.

The data of unemployment from MOM is different from World Bank

By MOM

World Bank's data on Singapore's unemployment

The above is the unemployment data of Singapore from World Bank website which is higher than MOM's data. And many years during last decade, Singapore's unemployment rate is above 5%. And we can expected most of the numbers come from the citizen.

While I can understand suspicion and irritation SG figures of authority invoke, I can not understand why people can’t perform basic research:

- World Bank labor data is based on ILO statistics- ILO statistic in turn is based on MOM’ publication data- When I bothered to check MOM’s labor survey that ILO actually references as original source of data, the figures that are listed as “World Bank” figures are actually MOM’s mid-year non-seasonally adjusted figures

Ergo, there is no conspiracy on MOM’s falsifying numbers and more honest “World Bank” numbers, because whatever mr. Tharman is quoting comes from the same publication, with government reporting seasonally adjusted data and World Bank reporting non-seasonally adjusted data.